One of the herd was a mare with a litter of foals nestled into the dense fluff on her back. She had broken off in search for a place to make a nest, so that she and her various children could rest safely and soundly.
She had found an old mattress which smelled of sweat and special-huggies, that didn’t work. She had found a couch, which was so broken it had rusty springs poking out of it’s cushions. That also didn’t work.
Mama was near to giving up hope entirely, when one of her babies squeaked.
“Mummah, wook!” It cried, pointing at something directly in front of mama.
It looked like one of those vroom-vroom monsters that humans rode around in, except the front was all buckled and smashed in. Mama vaguely thought that someone must have given it some pretty nasty owies, because there was a lot of dark reddish-brown booboo juice all over the front.
But in particular, her baby was pointing to the fact that the car was missing one of it’s rear doors, leaving a wide open passage to several large, plush leather seats.
“Wook mummah!” Baby cried. “Softies! Make good sweepies on softies!”
“Das wight babbeh!” Mama replied, waddling towards the car and gingerly clambering into it, hauling herself and her brood up onto the wide rear seats.
“Ooh, softies!” Another of her babies cooed as mama placed them on the seats one after another. Before long, all five of them, mama and her four foals, were nestled comfortably on the warm leather seats of the broken down old car.
The tiny family was ready to fall asleep, when they heard a strange sound. A kind of whirring, grinding noise, coming from high above them. Before any of them could say as much as ‘wha dat?’, something huge suddenly crashed into the roof of the car, buckling the metal and shattering the already-cracked windows.
“EEP!” Mama shrieked. “WHA DAT?! WHA GOIN’ ON?!”
“Mumnah! Scawedies!” One of the foals chirped, nuzzling into mama’s swollen teats for comfort.
Mama and her foals looked up, and saw some kind of five-taloned claw tearing through the metal of the car. The impact of the claw had been so great, the car’s roof had crumpled downwards, and the talons were starting to tear through the sides of the car too, bending the doors and crushing the metal.
“Gu 'way, munstah!” Mama snorted, puffing out her cheeks in fury at the huge metal thing. “Dis mummah’s babbehs! Yoo gu 'way nao!”
But the claw did not listen. Instead it continued, it’s talons sinking into the metal like butter, until finally coming to a halt. Mama had a brief moment of pride, believing she had scared it off at last… but things very quickly went from bad to worse.
Suddenly, with another grinding, whirring noise, the car lurched upwards, knocking mama and her babies down into the footwell between the seats.
“Mummah! Wha happenin’?!” Another baby squeaked, letting out a torrent of terrified urine directly into the face of it’s sibling.
“Mummah nu knu!” Mama wailed, as the car tilted and tipped and spun around them, feeling like the entire world was shifting under their feet.
Finally, with one sharp jerk, the car seemed to come to a halt. It swayed back and forth briefly, but the motion was more akin to gentle rocking rather than the terrifying lurching it had been only moments ago.
Then the claw opened.
It snapped apart like a gunshot, and the car suddenly fell. Mama and her babies, for a moment, felt themselves floating in the air. One of her babies, a pegasus, even began to flap his wings, joy on his face as the felt the sensation of flight for the first time in his life.
Then, after only a second of falling, the car landed with a smash on the ground.
Mama and her babies were thrown hard to the floor of the car, but in particular was the pegasus baby, his face still fixed in an expression of bliss, who was hurled down so violently that his fragile body broke and splintered from the impact. He wasn’t dead, however. He had somehow avoided that mercy, and simply wheezed and gasped in unimaginable pain as his own bones penetrated his own organs.
Mama was unable to move. The impact had buckled the front seats, forcing them back and pinning down mama under one of them.
“Huhuhu… mummah sowwy babbeh… wan gib huggies, buh… nu can mobe…”
Her babies were still on the other side of the car, having been shaken and jostled away from her during the car’s violent trip across the junkyard. The only upside was that, at the very least, they had stopped moving for now.
Then another, even worse sound began.
It was like a hissing, grinding noise, like a low-pitch ‘vroom’. None of the fluffies knew what it was, but they knew by now that it couldn’t be anything good.
Then it started.
The walls of the car began to buckle and crumple, the metal being bent and folded like paper. Fragments of glass left in the windows splintered and shattered as the metal around them was crushed, the entire car becoming thinner with every second. Mama felt the door behind her pressing up against her rear, pushing and squishing into her as the entire car compacted slowly.
Meanwhile, her babies were on the other side, all too terrified to move. Mama could see out through the missing door on their side, but all she saw was darkness and dingy metal. She was too scared to comprehend what she was seeing. All she knew was that she and her babies were in danger… and she couldn’t move.
“HEWP!” She screamed. “HEWP MUMMAH! HEWP!!!” But her voice couldn’t be heard, buried under the sounds of the car being crushed, and the sounds of the hydraulics responsible for the crushing. Not a single syllable of her pleas were audible to the rest of the junkyard.
But at long last, it seemed to stop. The huge metal parts began to retreat, and for a moment, mama felt a glimmer of hope in her tiny, fragile, idiotic heart.
Then the sound started up again, this time moving towards the front and back of the car.
Once more, the metal creaked as it was twisted and torn apart, compacting the car more and more as the crusher did what it was made for. Trapped inside the car, mama felt more of it squeezing into her, squashing her body on either side as the car’s interior became increasingly tiny.
“Heh… hep… huh…” She wheezed, the air forced out of her lungs as her body was squeezed by the rapidly compacting metal and plastic all around her.
“Mummah! Hewp!” Her foals chirped again and again, trapped on the other side of the car, as even more of the metal folded over them. The hydraulics continued to push, relentless and remorseless. There was another crack as another window fragment broke, showering the foals with hard crystalline pebbles. There was a sudden crunch as part of the roof caved in, pushing the tipped-back seat down onto the foals, squeezing them all down into the floor of the car.
Mama watched, gasping for breath, her eyes almost ready to pop out of her head from the crushing pressure of the hydraulics, but still alive, and still watching as her foals cried and shrieked for her, their tiny voices lost among the roaring of the machinery and the clattering and crunching of the car’s metal.
Suddenly, it happened.
The metal squeezed just tight enough, and mama’s body gave way, her bones cracking and her organs bursting. Her eyeballs, leaking blood, swelled and popped out of her skull, hanging limply on their nerves, her tongue lolling out of her mouth as she slumped lifelessly in her fixed position.
All while her foals were forced to stare at her mangled corpse, as the crusher compacted the car further and further around them.
One by one, they went the same way, their bodies smashed together by the squeezing metal around them. One’s eyes exploded from the pressure, another’s head came off, one was compacted and squashed down to nothing… the last survivor was the broken, wounded pegasus, who could only let out a chirp of fear before his body was finally flattened by the crusher.
Ten minutes later a magnetic crane was lowered into the machine and pulled out a perfect cube of crushed car metal, covered in stains of oil and what appeared to be blood… but the crane operator shrugged it off. There wasn’t enough for it to be a human, and the car was already covered in blood anyway, must’ve been from that.
Nobody ever noticed the tiny tuft of colourful fluff sticking out of one end of the cube.